god-haunted: faith, martyrdom, and the romanticization of suffering in religion

Thus we can describe this intangible experience of identity in faith in the cross as the enduring element in the mysticism of the cross, and as the inner reason for the outward expression of misery and the ever recurring protest against it.

A religious faith in eternity cannot add anything to the dignity and pathos of mourning; it can only subtract from the mourning by diminishing the sense of loss. This is not to say that avowedly religious people do not mourn. But insofar as they do mourn, their mourning is animated by a secular faith in the irreplaceable value of a finite life rath

Indeed, I define as religious any ideal of being absolved from the pain of loss.

To further aggravate our emotional woes, modernity has cast aside what had been, since the dawn of time, a central resource for coping with life’s vicissitudes. God has died and there is now little we can turn to, intone in front of, or beg for deliverance from when times grow hard. We dwell in a world ruled by the pitiless laws of science in which